You sages aren’t surpris’d to learn that cowardice
Is courage. Truths illumine and conceal.
The dulcet affirmation and the sour diss
Can equally be true. That’s no big deal.
The world is full of paradox — and now word is
That even space and time may not be real.
We only think we see and smell and touch things.
The “world” is like, say, Donkey Kong and such things.
It’s all just icons on an interface:
The sound of rain, that contract you just sign’d,
The microbe on a slide, the feel of lace,
The smell of skunks, the corner you were fined
For parking at, your arm, the very space
You (think you) move through — products of your mind.
And even little quarks, atomic particles,
Are not, as thought, the fundamental articles.
No, “conscious agents” are what’s fundamental.
The theory says it’s they and they alone
We’re sure of. Space? Time? Objects? Incidental.
They hint at some reality unknown.
The dawn, the dung, the breeze, the brain, the lentil:
In all of these, our faith is overblown.
Those conscious agents compass us and we
Create those things — though not, um, consciously.
*****
Max Gutmann writes: “Don Juan Finish’d fancifully completes Lord Byron’s unfinished comic epic. Excerpts have been contributed to Light, Lighten Up Online, Orbis, Slant, Think, the website of the Byron Society, and Pulsebeat, where ‘Conscious Agents’ is among the excerpts to have appeared. Formalverse has also reprinted another excerpt. ‘Conscious Agents’ is part of a digression from the plot, digression being an aspect of Byron’s epic mimicked in Don Juan Finish’d.”
Max Gutmann has contributed to dozens of publications including New Statesman, Able Muse, and Cricket. His plays have appeared throughout the U.S. and have been well-reviewed (see maxgutmann.com). His book There Was a Young Girl from Verona sold several copies.
Photo: “Consciousness Awakening on Vimeo by Ralph Buckley” by Ralph Buckley is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Form in Formless Times 
Oath of Avarice
I pledge allegiance to the corporation:
A “person” as the judges have proclaimed,
And place this “him” or “her” above my nation
Whose Constitution “he” or “she” has maimed
Pursuant to no legal obligation
Except immunity, however named,
For those investors in their campaign suites
Who’d rather that we call them our “elites.”
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2014
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The Muddled Ages
(with gratitude to Anthony Burgess for his verse-novel Byrne)
Polemic couched in poetry requires
No Introduction laying out The Plan.
The title’s pointed paradox aspires
To motivate the woman, child, or man
Equipped to grasp the tortured soul’s desires:
Put out the fire, or conflagration fan.
Chaos and confusion make things muddy.
Anarchy can quickly turn them bloody.
But such complicity marks Empire’s Age
That hurls commands to ‘Pay up!’ then to ‘Die!’
Mask-wearing politicians kneel on stage,
Though joint resort vacations give the lie
To their professed hostility. The rage
Of unemployed infected proles, they sigh,
Owes to those “leftists,” not those further “right”:
Play-acting pugilists who’ve faked a “fight.”
The witch (accused) screams “No I’m not!” then burns,
A euphemism for “those Russian bitches,”
Imprisoned for “legitimate concerns,”
The use of scapegoats scratches fascist itches.
The Congress pays their donors, then adjourns,
And blames the graft on “hacked” computer glitches.
In helplessness, the put-upon ask “Huh?
Senile Joe Biden? Deus ex Machina?”
The Muddled Ages now. Collapse beginning
With, first of all, two-thousand-sixteen’s “choice”
Of Pillory or Pompous, two frauds grinning,
Their siren song sung with a single voice.
Neither at all convinced that war means sinning.
Genetic gentry, both kill and rejoice
At Power’s perks, both risible and crass,
Like two cheeks of a mule’s or horse’s ass.
The protonymic “Chronic Argonaut,”
So-called by H. G. Wells before perfecting
The Time Machine’s Victorian theme and plot,
Might serve, as well, to label those selecting,
From times gone past, a living corpse who’s not
Named Trump: Joe Biden, ballot mark rejecting
The person they don’t want and blame on Putin.
Their man? Let’s just say, “Hardly Isaac Newton.”
But Wells got things ass-backwards in his story
Supposing that, in time, the ruling class,
Would morph into the Eloi, Morlock quarry,
Or food for working stiffs who once ate grass.
Instead proles vote Republican (or Tory);
For Democrats, with tits and balls of brass,
Who promise to “resist” along with “darkie”
While serving up rapacious oligarchy.
No new thing has a chicken’s chance. No change
Will come from movements led by those imbued
With jaded jargon slogans that estrange
More than convert. How easily unglued
Their “sticking power,” once the rich arrange
To fund their “fighting” flag, a rainbow-hued
Co-opted symbol, provocation painted
On everything, which leaves no thing untainted.
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2020
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